“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” – Ron Swanson
We’ve decided to brush the dust off a classic Seattle event (in our minds), put a CX twist on it and whole-ass an event this Sunday. Is it a race? Is it a ride? Hell if we know. All I know is we put the idea together over a beer and it sounded awesome. So we waited a couple days, had some more beers while discussing it some more and it STILL sounded awesome. And then we went on a scouting ride, drank a few beers and put together a route that had us hurting but feeling pretty good that we had crammed as much shit into a sandwich as possible.
What do you need to know?
We’re going to start at the South East Corner of Genesee Park at 11 am Sunday, April 1st. Rolling out at 1130 after grabbing names, giving some instructions and collecting $10 to go on the ride. Why $10? Because we have expenses and shit! That’s why.
We recommend gears. Lots of them. But you be you and feel free to bring a SS, Fixed, unicycle (FPDX) and heckle the shit out of us for putting on a non-SS friendly event. (Put on your own event and you can make the rules.)
We also recommend larger than 25c tires. Please refer to the above but substitute tire sizes for bikes.
We’ll be ending at the Slowboat where we might have prizes. We’ll probably have Hodala Merch for sell. We’re trying to get a beer special. We’ll definitely be watching Flanders.
I can hear you now…’this is pretty last minute and seems like a pretty shoddy event’. And I’ll remind you that this is a Hodala event and we “Never half-ass two things. We whole-ass one thing.”
Here are the words we put together about the Woodland Park race. You can read about it here or take a look at All Hail The Black Market or CX Magazine for their personally edited versions :
It’s been randomly known in some circles that Hodala is a team that was built without giving a shift. Part of this is due to the nature of the Single Speeder and the culture that has helped cultivate this mentality. The other part can be attributed to the amazing people who repeatedly host events and tolerate us year after year. Case in Point, the fine people at MFG Cyclocross here in Seattle who have often turned a blind eye, or merely crossed their arms and shook their head back and forth like a disappointed parent when our “soup kitchen” of a trailer shows up.
With no intent on traveling to #sscxwc in Italy (you’re welcome EU) we turned our full attention to the crown jewel of Seattle CX….Woodland Park. In years past we’ve hosted luau’s, beach parties, a disco, 80’s metal fest and have often created a winter wonderland at what has been dubbed “Hodala Corner”. This year’s plan was a little more ambitious…make a ‘long cut’ with a giant slip-n-slide and a foam pit. We figured it would take 30+ pallets, some plywood, a big roll of visqueen, over a dozen bottles of dish soap, 3 kegs of tasty beer and a leaf blower. No problem. Right?
Disclaimer, this is not legal in most forms of racing and I’m sure would be punishable at an OBRA race with a DQ and forfeiture of all Rapha apparel. We did not alter the course in any way (we merely created an ‘option’) and we got permission from MFG in the form of a subtle ‘don’t make a mess’ response.
To be totally honest we had NO idea about what everyone would think of it and were hopeful that people would partake in the little bit of fun we were trying to create. By the end of the day we were beyond stoked with the number of people who ‘opted in’ for the shenanigans and completely blown away when the leaders of the Pro ½’s race (Steve Fisher, Spencer Paxson, Russell Stevenson and Kaler Marshall with the overall series title on the line) came to an accord and giggled their way down the ‘illegal’ course option covered in Hodala foam. Like finding the true meaning of Christmas, I guess it really is possible to race a bike and have some fun.
I’m sure there are some people out there who will find some kind of fault in what we did and maybe claim that these kinds of antics are ruining cross. To which my only reply is to crack a beer and salute them in their pursuit of outstanding results in their athletic endeavors. Meanwhile, we’ll just place another 6-pack in the pit area and continue to spread our own kinda racing around.
That’s a wrap on the 2017 CX Season. Time to put the Hobago back into storage and start planning shit for CX Nationals that will be in our backyard in 2 years.
“Don’t worry….we’ll turn off the lights when we leave”
Like all unwanted guests, we’re often the last to leave the party, bar or cross course. So perhaps it was destiny we found ourselves on the cover of the final issue of ROAD magazine from the shit show that was SSCXWCXPDX.
Tubthumping may have been our theme song for the weekend. Please don’t ask why…We swear Adam…we did NOT steal your race packet and take it to the gentleman’s club2016 really needed to fuck off. Is it to early to tell 2017 to do the same?
We enjoyed a particularly indecent relationship with the fine people at ROAD that included trips to Philly, Bikini Baristas, the grail (RIP) and our very own Hot Laps Craig contributing to a number of issues with a column titled Hot Topics with Craig. The shuttering of their doors is further proof that we just can’t have nice things.
Within a week of the announcement the website was turned off, and we were informed that no print version would be available. We did manage to download a copy and have it available if you want to give it a gander.
Should you trust something we put on the internet for you to download? Probably not. But go ahead and do it anyway.
You know those days when it is cold and rainy outside, but you’ve managed to pull off exactly the right combination of layering so that you stay dry and never get too cold or warm on your ride? Those magical days when you’re not shivering, but you don’t end your ride with a back pocket full of arm warmers, extra gloves, rain jacket and a wool jersey wrapped around your waist Kurt Cobain-style? Today was like that. My trip to Bend for the USGP last weekend was, sadly, not.
It is difficult to prepare for the amount of awesomeness that was about to go down in addition to the forecast of rain and sub-freezing temperatures all weekend. Two 28 degree, 8:45 am ‘cross races in Bend in what was supposed to be pouring rain would’ve been enough, but there was also the matter of a quick pit stop in PDX for The Sword on Saturday night. So on Friday morning I threw all of my rain gear into a bag with my Sorel boots and most metal-est t-shirt and headed to work with a giant fucking bag on my carbon ‘cross bike.
We got down to Portland early enough on Friday evening to stand around in a Fred Meyer parking lot and drink a few beers with Case, Jason Britton, and some guys from PDW. Eventually a security guard came by and said “I don’t mind if you guys hang out, but keep the profanity down, okay?” No problem, officer.
Sometimes I really love Portland. Wait… I mean… FPDX!
And then we saw The motherfucking Sword!
We also ran into Cheever, but I wasn’t able to get a photo because he was too busy jumping onto people’s backs and grabbing strangers asses. He was definitely edging into Stan Beaver territory.
If you live on the West Coast and you didn’t go see The Sword last week then you’re doing it wrong.
– begin metal tangent –
Did you guys see that Metallica is now on Spotify? I mean… there are a lot of things going against Metallica and lots of people have lots of reasons for hating them now. There’s all of the Napster stuff, the fence he built on his property to keep mountain bikers out, the existence of this photo, etc. Not to mention all of the music after 1988 (or 1991, depending on how indignant you want to get). But c’mon, Metallica made some pretty fucking rad albums. Remember Garage Days? A very inebriated friend even recently tried to convince a few of us that Metallica was the best metal band of all time by saying “How many really great albums does Sabbath have? 2? Metallica’s got at least 3.5!”. (Let’s not talk about the other friend who advocated for AC/DC by going on and on about how Back in Black is by far their worst album. F you Joe.) Anyway, you can now go listen to Master of Puppets without having to directly give Metallica any money. If that’s the sort of thing that you’re into.
– end metal tangent –
Where was I? Oh! So we got out of Portland late enough that we didn’t arrive in Bend until about 4.5 hours before our race. What is the USGP thinking when the single speed race goes off at 8:45 am? Ugh. I get up early on the regular, but that doesn’t give anyone nearly enough time to recover from the previous nights drinks, have a cup of coffee, take a crap, and maybe, just maybe, get a lap in before the start of their race. I might’ve bitched about MFG having single speeds as the last race of the day, but this is not an alternative I’m okay with. I’ve got a new found respect for all of the Cat 4 and Masters racers who are out there at the crack of dawn all season. Fortunately, some of us are made of hardier stuff than I am and Greg raced to 5th place on Saturday despite the same drinks, metal, and lack of sleep that I had. Craig took second and still managed to find time to film Hot Laps With Craig.
Afterwards, Randy came through with some Apple Pie Moonshine from someone’s Mom and it made me forget about how bad at racing I am.
He’s really been strengthening his heckling muscles while recovering from shoulder surgery and I thought he was going to make some of the pros cry during their race. Its no surprise but Hodala continues to kinda be dicks to Chris Jones. Ah well. It’s just jokes. It might be the apple pie, but for some reason I can’t remember the best heckles. Maybe DR will put ’em in the comments.
Sally had to “work” that night so a few of us went to a few bars for a few drinks and few games of pool and one girl with rad chest tattoos.
Sunday morning brought more of the same. No rain, but a frozen course and at least one Hodala rider who was too hungover/not awake enough to complete more than a few laps. Craig again brought home a 2nd place finish that secured him as the overall single speed winner for the USGP series. I mostly just hope this doesn’t mean an end to the Hot Laps season. Maybe he’ll make one in Louisville.
We all got our heckle on during the pro races, but we’re not complete pricks – Joey bought Katerina Nash a cake and we all sang her happy birthday on the finish line.
Also, Ben Berdon was rocking the World Famous Wizarm Warmers during his races this weekend.
And that’s all that I’ve got for you this week. Special thanks to .ca for being our Canadian Sherpa this weekend. It was also great to see all of the kittens down in Bend. Though we’ll be seeing a lot more of them at the SS Cup party when they don bikinis to wash bikes. It should be a fun party that promises to look something like this:
One last thing: I sent out the second round of Hodala/Philly shirts a couple of days ago, but am still waiting on more XLs. If you’ve ordered a shirt but haven’t received it, I promise it’ll be there soon.
It seems that we’ve got an increasing number of folks showing up to this site on a daily basis via google searches for SSCXWC 2012 or Single Speed Cyclocross World Championship because of a post I wrote last fall after the Hodala crew had just returned from San Francisco.
Well, as all of you have probably noticed, there’s no new content which isn’t all that strange because no one has any info on SSCXWC 2012. At all. At this point we’re all just assuming that it’ll happen sometime before January 1st in the vicinity of Santa Cruz, CA.
There’s a blog that hasn’t been updated since early April. (Weirdly enough they never approve any comments to the one post that is up.)
There’s a slightly cryptic listing on the Northern California Nevada Cycling Association calendar for December 1 and December 2 with Murphy Mack listed as the promoter and no other information.
And that’s it.
So what are we to do? Here in the NW, ‘cross season starts this upcoming weekend and every promoter has had their calendar online since June. If we’re going to keep SSCXWC going long enough to take it to the east coast – not to mention give the promoters in CA an incredible amount of money – we’ve gotta book flights and hotels/houses, make plans, disappoint family members that we’ll (once again) be going to race and get drunk with our friends instead of making the trek home for the holidays. I mean, what the fuck? This race is a national event that traditionally takes place between the beginning of October and the end of November, right? Aren’t we kind of cutting it close here? Am I being impatient? Seattle announced the date for SSCXWC 2010 in fucking April.
So what do we do? I guess nothing. They’ll announce the date super fucking late and we’ll all spend much more money on flights and hotels that we would’ve if Santa Cruz had their shit together and we’ll go and have a good time and drink beers and celebrate our weird little corner of the cycling world in spite of the fact that the promoters maybe sorta kinda selfishly kept the event for themselves instead of letting Philly take it at the SSCXWC 2011 afterparty when no one from Santa Cruz even showed up to claim the event. But I’m not bitter about it.
Fuck it. We’ll probably see you all at some as yet to be determined date in California. If not… Philly 2013.
The last couple of weekends have been a whirlwind of activity for the Hodala crew. A couple of weekends ago, a bunch of us split up into three teams for GoMeansGo’s Nine to Five scavenger hunt.
It all started out with a double rainbow
Seriously. Double fucking rainbow.
and then there was a bunch of scavenger hunting before this happened:
and then there were some bars and more scavengering and then 6 am breakfast greyhounds at the 5 Point.
Everything else is sort of a blur of frantically collecting a ton of random objects that I still need to clean out of my messenger bag. Greg has a nice wrap-up of the event over at GoMeansGo. It looks like Randy & Joe took 5th, Marcy’s team was maybe 10th 4th, and Nate and I ended up something like 18th. I’m assuming that Joe got 100 extra points or so for that photo above.
For people who are awake around 5 am everyday it was surprisingly easy to stay up all night as long as we kept moving and we only really ran out of steam when we sat down in bars for awhile. The vintage 4Loko that we drank around 2:30am probably helped a bit. I’m hoping that we’ll get more of the team out for this event next year. Ryan and Greg at GoMeansGo put on a really great race.
This past weekend was, of course, Wizard Staffs Across the Universe.
The day started out being shitty and rainy, but if we let the weather stop us from getting drunk then the terrorists have truly won. Fortunately, RaleighUSA fully supports all of Hodala’s activities and we had some tents to keep us dry.
Meanwhile in the Dirty South (Tacoma), Myers apparently thought it was a good idea to add an element of danger into Wizard Staffing – welding.
Those Churchkey’s might kinda taste like crap, but you can’t argue with a steel can.
Up in Seattle we kept drinking
and drinking
until we all decided to take our hard-earned wizard status on a walkabout to the nearby PRIDE celebration where some Canadians in tutus did body shots off of F-Joe
and DR managed to take his underwear off in the middle of the bar for them without getting 86’ed. It was truly a miracle of drunken assholery.
There’ll be a video and more photos up as soon as Sally can get though the nearly 10 hours of video that we shot on Saturday.
We did manage to add a new wrinkle to the fine art of Wizard Staffing – the “lips on staff tip.” Basically, you can tip another drinkers staff up with your own wizard staff and they’ve gotta keep drinking for as long as you do, but you must have your lips on your staff in order to force someone else to keep drinking. So here are the current Hodala rules for Wizard Staff day:
1. You aren’t a wizard until your staff is as tall as you are (I’m 15 beers tall).
2. You must have your lips on your wizard staff in order to force a person to keep drinking when tipping their staff.
3. You need a lot more duct tape than you think you do. Go buy some more.
After a day of letting our livers rest a few of us went to scout a new ‘cross club course and alter a few of the ones from last year. We’ve got the courses mostly set and the beer sponsorships nailed down, so dust off your ‘cross bikes; the 2012 Cross Club season kicks off a week from today. If you aren’t currently on the list and want to do some less-than-legal ‘cross racing in public parks every Tuesday night, sign up for the email updates.
That’s all for now. Keep an eye out for the WSAtU video and we’ll see you next Tuesday.
Thanks to everyone who came out to the Ides of March this weekend. I can honestly say that all of you who stayed home because of the snow missed out. As I was cursing to myself and praying to… i guess myself… while I was finalizing the course that morning I thought that none of you fools would ever leave your house to race 25 miles around town and climb what easily ended up bring 300+ stairs.
I've never wanted to murder someone at 10 am as much as when I took this photo. But whom?
You’re all winners. Doubly so considering that 70% of the field cut the course and the actual “winner” is still sorta up for debate. Bart came into the finish first, but skipped the most fun part of the course coming down Cheasty after taking some bad routing advice from Dirty Randy. Joe was the first in to have ridden all – or most of – the course, but he’s pretty shifty and there’s just no way we could let him win. All he got was some public shaming and a t-shirt with his face on it.
The text reads "I got fucked by Joe Hamilton and all I got was this t-shirt." Ladies - we printed a few extra that'll be sitting by F-Joe's bed. Available while supplies last so you'd better hurry
Then came along our perpetual winners – Brian and Craig. Congrats to them.
For the suckers who missed out this weekend, the green arrows and shamrocks will most likely still be around for a few weeks. Start at the stairs at the bottom of Holgate and follow them from there. Here’s a map. The only instructions you’ll really need are:
1. If you can see a trail beside the road, you’re probably supposed to be on it.
2. When you get to the outdoor fireplace/chimney, go back down the stairs.
3. When in doubt, climb up the road instead of coasting down it
USA Cycling Rule 1A33 – The cyclo-cross season begins September 1st of one year and ends on the last day of February of the following year.
…we tend to enjoy getting rad all year round. This past weekend was the second race in the Frost Club series – a special couples-themed Valentine’s relay/madison-style cross race for all of you lovers out there.
The HeartBraker began with a 3-legged Le Mans start…
Sally and I are embarrassingly good at the 3-legged race.
Now that I look at the photo, does anyone else see that Myers and F-Joe aren’t connected while they’re stepping over that barrier? I feel like this should be added to CXMagazine’s Readers Choice awards for “biggest controversy” after Rapha not getting tattoos at SSCXWC and SF basically keeping the race instead of sending it to Philly (No, we’re not over either of those things.)
… Where were we? … Oh, 3-legged Le Mans. Partners grabbed their bike and had to trade off 3 minute-ish hot laps around a surprisingly hard course and pass off the bike that they were sharing.
Half of the reason we decided on this format was to see whose bike Tyler and Trista would ride. They chose hers:
All of you need to buy some more Nuun so that they can replace that Kona with a shiny new Raleigh.
After 12 laps, each rider on the top 3 teams had to slam a beer before their final laps.
Nat doing what he does best.
Myers and F-Joe ended up running away with the race, which is a little less surprising now that there’s evidence that they were cheating from the start line.
That flower is like the scarlet letter of cheating at fake cyclocross races.
Fortunately, there’s another race coming up for the rest of us to try and steal their glory. The Ides of March will be a ‘cross alleycat on March 17th. Show up to Schooner Exact around noon. There’ll be more info coming soon so keep an eye out here or over at Red Lantern Races.
Bring some money with you as well because you’re going to want one of the new Frost Club shirts.
I promise that you'll look this good wearing it.
All of the proceeds from these races and the t-shirts goes to the Leukemia Lymphoma Society so just buy one already. If you want one and can’t make it out to the race just email me and we’ll figure it out – hodalacx [at] gmail [dot] com .
After drinking beer and riding bikes, it certainly seems like our favorite thing to do is make videos of ourselves drinking beer and riding bikes. Fortunately, it seems like Cleveland has had some extra time on his hands recently and made these for your enjoyment.
Where to begin? After a long weekend we’re (mostly) all home, (mostly) all sobered up and I’ll try to piece together the parts of Hodala!’s trip down to SSCXWC2011 that I can remember. Suffice to say that we took the Hodala! show on the road and did what we do in California. So basically, drinks, drinks, and more drinks with a little bike racing and a splash of nudity thrown in for good measure.
Most of us had our doubts about San Francisco taking this on after the spectacle that went down in Seattle last year. They may have cheated their way to victory (check out 4:13 of this video) but we figured we’d take this Sparkle Party down to SF and insure that a good time was had by all – discounting the folks whose race we ruined.
As we all rolled into town we stopped by Zeitgeist to pick up some supplies and leave a size-able portion of our paychecks behind before heading to Raleigh’s party. Our crew figured we’d be far too drunk to figure out a BART schedule to Sheila Moon’s and American Cyclery agreed to throw us a party so that we didn’t have to head over to the East Bay. Impressively, we had our very first person ever get thrown out of a Hodala! party. This was a Haley’s Comet style event – it’ll be another 76 years before it happens again.
American’s keg of Anchor Steam made some of our early qualifier start times a little less than enjoyable, but most of us ended up making it into the main race after the 4 hour slow tour of SF intermittently interrupted by sprints up stairs, across a beach, through a field of wood chips, etc. There was a hell of a lot of running for a bike race qualifier.
photo by Neil Berrett
I was really impressed with how much Raleigh owns the ‘cross scene down there. Every qualifying group had at least one of our Hodala SS Carbon ‘Cross bikes and most had a couple of the Rainier or High Life frames. In my group of 10 there were 3 Hodala frames, a SSCXWC2010 frame, and a High Life. Well played SF; you made us feel right at home.
After the qualifiers we had drinks at our rental house courtesy of some Schooner Exact kegs before we headed to the party at the Sports Basement. All that I can say is that Pixie Bike racing is hard. I was ready to murder myself after trying to ride that tiny bike around for 3 laps until Stevil threw a beer in my face. I’d post photos of that party but they’d be even blurrier than my vision was – someone was laid out on the hood of a car, someone fell asleep at the bar, someone curled up in the back seat of a cab like a sleeping kitten, and one very special someone stopped a corvette in the middle of the street in an attempt to hitch a ride back to our house.
Race day was a little bit of this:
photo by boxdogbikes
and this:
Photo by Jason Perry
and yada yada yada… Brian Myers took 4th overall. Well done, sir. Race reports are everywhere if you want to read more about 3′ tall log barriers, and a surprisingly slippery Golden Gate Park course.
Philly, we really tried to push you over the top when not a single representative from Santa Cruz showed up at the after party to claim the 2012 race, but we were foiled. We’ll take our party slightly further down the coast next year and keep doing our thing.
San Fran, you did good. We didn’t believe in you, but you pulled it off. See you in Santa Cruz.
SF may have been a new venue but we left our mark.
